If we are to "abolish the IRS," what will it be replaced with? The Internal Revenue Service is a central tenet of the government system: it pays the bills. It is responsible for bringing in the money that pays servicemen, employees, grants, Congressmen, those who receive entitlements, and quite literally everything else. Without something resembling an IRS, the United States of America ceases to exist.

Could we, in theory, abolish the current IRS? Sure. The tax code has become a boondoggle, a massive maze of regulations, loopholes, credits and surcharges that it is practically unmanageable in its current form. However, we cannot simply go without revenue collection or without taxes, contrary to what the 47% believe.

Whatever system eventually gets adopted must be uniform, with loopholes and credits kept to a bare minimum. It should NEVER be allowed to use its power for social engineering or coercion, even if that means a Constitutional amendment to do so. (It shouldn't... after all, it is bribery, an impeachable offense in the Constitution, and SCOTUS did in the 1800s rule that the power to tax is the power to destroy, but later SCOTUSes, Roberts chief among them, have thrown that out the window.) It must also be accompanied by a blunt reassessment of what we Americans expect out of government and a dramatic cut in spending, and yes, that includes entitlements. I can assure you, though, the IRS must exist. It is necessary, and proper, if the rules for its existence do not encourage the type of selective headhunting that has been used here.

If we are to "abolish the IRS," what will it be replaced with? The Internal Revenue Service is a central tenet of the government system: it pays the bills. It is responsible for bringing in the money that pays servicemen, employees, grants, Congressmen, those who receive entitlements, and quite literally everything else. Without something resembling an IRS, the United States of America ceases to exist.

Could we, in theory, abolish the current IRS? Sure. The tax code has become a boondoggle, a massive maze of regulations, loopholes, credits and surcharges that it is practically unmanageable in its current form. However, we cannot simply go without revenue collection or without taxes, contrary to what the 47% believe.

Whatever system eventually gets adopted must be uniform, with loopholes and credits kept to a bare minimum. It should NEVER be allowed to use its power for social engineering or coercion, even if that means a Constitutional amendment to do so. (It shouldn't... after all, it is bribery, an impeachable offense in the Constitution, and SCOTUS did in the 1800s rule that the power to tax is the power to destroy, but later SCOTUSes, Roberts chief among them, have thrown that out the window.) It must also be accompanied by a blunt reassessment of what we Americans expect out of government and a dramatic cut in spending, and yes, that includes entitlements. I can assure you, though, the IRS must exist. It is necessary, and proper, if the rules for its existence do not encourage the type of selective headhunting that has been used here.

Therein lies the central problem. This is another variation on the "who will watch the watchers" problem. The Founders attempted to deal with it by weakening the central government, both by restricting it to exercising only enumerated powers and by separating the legislative, executive, and judicial powers and setting them up so that they cross-checked each other. In short, the Founders opted to use friction and inefficiency as the means to put sand in the wheels of government. And it generally worked.

However, statists and collectivists - those who have a thirst for exercising force against their neighbors with impunity - found ways around those limits. Whether nominally "right wing" or "left wing" they have slowly chipped away at the built-in ineficiencies. For example, although clothed in the pretty language of democracy, the 17th Amendment was a serious mistake because it removed one of the cross-checks the Founders intentionally built into the Constitution.

The watershed, however, was the reign - for that is what it was - of FDR. It was during those ill-fated years that the Supreme Court was essentially bullied into granting the federal government effectively unlimited power by giving very wide latitude to Congress' own interpretation of its powers and, in particular, permitting the federal government to use the Commerce Clause as an excuse to do almost anything it wanted. FDR took that power and ran with it, almost single-handedly inventing Hobbes' Leviathan - the all-powerful administrative state, aka the "nanny" state - that we are saddled with today.

At bottom, though, the source of the problem was political: primarily leftists (FDR was a self-admitted "left of center" kind of fascist) creating crises - FDR created the Great Depression inasmuch as his policies turned a run-of-the-mill recession into a depression - and misleading people into believing that giving the federal government more and more power - in the name of "the people" - would solve all of the problems that beset them.

Just as the source of the problem is political, so too is the solution. Now that we've got almost 100 years of experience under the all-encompassing administrative estate, it's time to have a serious political discussion about whether it's a worthwhile form of government. Those who oppose it can win only if they can convince a majority of their fellow citizens that the direction of future growth lies away from the administrative state, not toward it.

Under present circumstances I'm not sure if that can be accomplished short of having the country as it is now die, hopefully to be reborn from its own ashes like the phoenix.

Somehow, we paid the bills before there was a federal income tax or IRS.

Logged

I wonder when the lies will stop and truth begin, even as grim as the truth may be. And then I remember that for 70 years, the reign of terror in Russia called itself "the people's government." We have so far to fall, yet we are falling fast and Hell yawns to receive us.